Steps Removed And Sequence Shortened

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Intestines Bento
The Rice Box now has a number of bento boxes and a bento menu with photos on. Last but by no means least on the menu is 'intestines bento' described as Mongolian pork intestines, pak choi and a poached egg.
Intestines Bento has a certain ring to it, sounds like the name of a thug in a comedy detective novel.
(we had the vegetarian bento).

C/C++/C#
Bjarne Stroustrup does not like the term C/C++. He says that C/C++ does not exist. Apress have a section in their on-line catalog C/C++/C# . I imagine Bjarne Stroustrup would be very unthrilled at that, a thought that I find makes me strangely happy.

I can haz root canal
I have had the 4th and hopefully final phase of the root canal. My jaw now feels somewhat sore, more I suspect from the metal thing the dentist screws round your tooth to keep the filling in, then having ( go on, look, I dare you! ). As it was infected again he has given me some antibiotics on a yellow prescription. They are the vicious ones that taste metallic and that you can't drink alcohol when you're taking them, not that the probability that I will have alcohol in any given few day antibiotic cycle is that high anyway. I have started eating the live yoghurt, in the hope that taking it internally will be sufficient :-)
The dentist said he had put a filling on but I might need a crown so clearly the idea of trying to save the previous crown was quietly dropped. The tooth was held together with a giant filling before for years anyway.

Harvey is picking up and throwing round a duvet...
Presumably on the misapprehension that it is a sheep, although unlike the late Buffy he has not perfected the 'breaking the neck on the way down having thrown it into the air' trick which she obviously knew by instinct or was taught by a passing Deerhound.

Friends
So, Microsoft have a 'thing' called Bing (it has an API apparently, but then so does The Guardian - remind me, is the call new NewLabourShill or NewLabourShill.new ?). There is, as you probably don't know because it failed to make a splash for a variety of reasons, an open source PIM called Chandler. http://chandlerproject.org/

Clearly, someone needs to work on combining the two and then we will have Chandler Bing.

So...
The double dip... Interestingly, this Friday the car-parks were back to the recession mode i.e. the free car-park was full and the pay 40p and/or shop at Waitrose car-park had spaces. Clearly there is a hidden variable in action.

We had a failed trip to see the Banksy in the museum and art gallery in Bristol. Having got there we saw the queue at a notice saying 'estimated time 1h 30m (or come back before the end of August). The queue was wide and not moving, so we had some lunch in the Folk House café, which had the sort of things that by law all such places have to serve i.e. vegan tapas. This was very nice and we stole the smokers' table on the balcony to viciously sit outside and not smoke. Inside three chaps were having a heated debate about something political / philosophical. When we left I deduced from something on the notice-board that this was probably the Bristol Free-Thinkers, who Free Think at 2 p.m. on Saturday in the café. All welcome, so we could have joined in if we had wanted to which, of course, we didn't.

We then went back to Temple Meads by means of a boat from the waterfront, or whatever it's called, which went via the SS Great Britain which made it about 25 minutes and quite scenic. I rather fear that some of the property developers will have come a cropper, some of the new flats had what looked to me like classic fake balcony furniture to make them look lived in.

Despite having been to Bristol quite a lot back in the day (to use a phrase I seem to remember someone on here hates but I can't remember who, so there), mainly to see C WINOLJ (IIBOE (*)) (AIRCCE (*)), I am rather vague on its urban topography, I don't think C was much of one for exploring the gritty inner-city. Also, back when we lived near Birmingham we occasionally went there on our own to go to the sadly now shut up-market (by our standards) veggie restaurant so I must have known how to get there, but I suspect it's a matter of knowing how to get to 2 or 3 places from the end of the M32.
The train went on the northern route past Bristol Parkway and then down into the centre due to engineering works. The fact that there are two routes past Swindon is one of these things that I forget until I am reminded of it, like the roundness of the Earth. This did, of course, mean we had a trip on a route I haven't been on before. One of the stations looks quite attractive in a 'makes you wonder what was so terrible about this area at one point to get the money to do this up' sort of way.
The area round Temple Meads is clearly a redevelopment area in the sense of 'we've knocked lots of stuff down, now there's been a property crash'. The South West Regional Development Quango posters looked rather desperate to me, but regional development policy is a mystery at the best of times, let alone the pre-apocalyptic global financial OMFGWAGTDBBQ times in which we live. Somehow I suspect things will be heavy going, I don't believe London will lose its financial capital status, but presumably most things in Bristol are likely to be 'back office' things and therefore end up in Bangalore etc.

Anyway, it was a nice day out, and it's probably quicker to get to the centre of Bristol than the centre of London from here, though more expensive.

(*) Indeed, is barely on email
(**) And isn't really called Cecil anyway

Today's one line Google ad weirdness
Restposten Toilettenpapier - www.Euroseptica.eu - Toilettenpapier Tiefpreisgarantie! 365 Tage Bestellannahme, 24h am Tag

(Google translate says 'remnants of toilet paper' which is disturbing, but if you just translate Restposten you get 'closeouts' which seems more plausible to me though I find the concept of an end-of-line toilet paper dealer somewhat weird).

PollyToynbee->Delete()
I have a horrible feeling this isn't a bizarre elaborate joke
http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform

even though the phrase 'exploiting the depth and quality of the Guardian's content' superficially appears to be a bit of a give-away.

Quite amused by this spam message title
"You can be ugly and stupid as long as your shaft is big"

Hmm (again)
I wonder if there is a non irksome marketing reason why iPod OS updates need iTunes updates, which because of Apple's inability to write software that plays nicely on Windows will inevitably need running whilst logged on to my PC as administrator, which will then provoke lots of other software into an orgy of updating.

The Twitter revolution
Beyond the irksome vainglorious mutterings of the blogosphere and the depressing slacktivism of 'hey everyone, set your Twitter time to Tehran, that's help the oppressed masses, retweet this now', am I the only one to think that it is interesting that a dubious Web 2.0 service with no visible revenue stream is being lauded as a key component in destabilising an anti-U.S. government?

[End tin foil hat mode]

Green shoots of recovery
Because the plural of anecdote IS data contrary to what you may have heard.

1. The chap that does my hair was booked up all day when I rang up yesterday. This is the first time in a year or so I haven't been able to get a slot a day in advance. Of course, they could just have got rid of people :-)

2. The town centre has three car parks. One of them is my preferred car park and is free, but it is always full on Fridays. One of the other two costs 40 p for an hour (refundable if you spend 5 quid in Waitrose), the other is free but is a bit further from the centre and awkward to get to, you have to go down a narrow road which is essentially only wide enough for one vehicle, with hilarious results.
Since the beginning of the global financial OMFG the free car park has been full and the pay one has had spaces, which is a reversal of the state of affairs before the global financial OMFG. This week, however, the pay car-park was full and the free one had spaces. Clearly people (a) feel they can afford to go to Waitrose again and/or (b) can afford to pay 40p to shorten their drive and walk slightly.

Not quite last
We did the Yarnton 5 this evening - by convention the something 5 or something 10 means miles, if the race is kilometres then it says something k. Looking at the other runners lining up it was clear that there was a decent chance that I would come last. It is, apparently, the county championship. As it happened there were a few people behind me, but definitely I was in the 'long tail' this time, with

t__m__i one of the two people in front of me, out of sight round corners for some of the time. I ended up running slightly faster than I intended to to avoid falling off the back, so it was possibly a personal best which is quite good as I am not really at my fittest at the moment.

Don't tell mummy; Please, Daddy, No
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Inspiring-Lives-Vol-Box-Set/dp/0007805543

Inspiring Lives (8 Vol. Box Set) - Don't Tell Mummy; Please, Daddy, No; The Little Prisoner; The Choice; Street Kid; An Angel Saved My Life; An Angel By My Side; The Invisible Girl (Paperback)

Want an instant collection of misery lit, look no further. This does appear to be genuine.

Bizarrely, I was looking up the purveyor of fine computer science books Don Box and this came up in the first page of the search, presumably because of Box Set and Don as in Don't Tell Mummy.

We have a Tory
The margin, 225, is such that I don't feel guilty about saying that I didn't mind delivering leaflets but wouldn't knock on doors due to my allergy to people.
I hope the 334 Green and 189 Labour voters are pleased with the result. Gah.

Mr Weasel's Big Poll Of Ecodoom
Poll #1411053 The big poll of ecodoom
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

I expect civilisation as we know in to have, in 50 years

View Answers

survived
15 (65.2%)

collapsed due to climate OMFGWAGTDBBQ
1 (4.3%)

collapsed due to energy shortage (overall or readily transportable)
1 (4.3%)

collapsed due to the technological singularity
0 (0.0%)

survived in some sense but not as we know it due to the singularity
2 (8.7%)

collapsed due to some other reason (stated below or in comments)
4 (17.4%)

Other reason for collapse?

View Answers

Over the timescale of 50 years I expect climate change

View Answers

To have made little impact due to there not being much of it
2 (8.7%)

To have made little impact due to ingenious mitigation strategies
2 (8.7%)

To have made the world considerably shittier for the world's poorer inhabitants
19 (82.6%)

To have wiped out billions of the world's poorer inhabitants
0 (0.0%)

To have lead to the collapse of civilisation except in small pockets
0 (0.0%)

To have turned the world into a Venus like inferno
0 (0.0%)

I believe that the generally excepted mathematical models of climate change

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Are accurate
15 (71.4%)

Are coincidentally right (models wrong, conclusions right)
3 (14.3%)

Are accidentally wrong
3 (14.3%)

Are deliberately wrong just like in that nice Mr Creighton's novel
0 (0.0%)

Bad-ass geoengineering solutions for climate change

View Answers

Will not be necessary
0 (0.0%)

Will be tried and fail
8 (34.8%)

Will not be tried for political reasons
9 (39.1%)

Will not be tried due to needing energy we don't have
4 (17.4%)

Will succeed
2 (8.7%)

Was surprised
... that there was a political headline on the news on 5 Live, I thought that convention was that they said 'there are elections taking place today with the polls closing at x p.m. and now a story about bunnies'.
Still, they were talking about football on the 'breakfast phone-in' (otherwise known as we have saved money by removing the lunchtime news and added an hour of wittering), this confirming the theory that football exists to give men something to talk about apart from politics.

I do not think this will end well
They appear to be building an earth pyramid in the middle of the post-apocalyptic wasteland in the centre of the site at work. There is only a base so far but it is clearly a pyramid.

Nicky Campbell
I caught a couple of minutes of The Execution Channel this morning on the way to work. Nicky Campbell seemed to be organising a march of illiterate (or certainly inarticulate) peasants armed with flaming torches and pitchforks on number 10 Downing Street. No doubt Victoria Derbyshire will be taking over at 10 arranging the old ladies with knitting needles and wool in the front row.

Temped to post the punchline as the title, but I won't
We had an expedition to Reading, jewel of the western London exurbs, in the search of clothes. In my case this was jeans that fitted and was unsuccessful.
We then went for an early dinner at the RISC Cafe in the buildings owned and used by RISC, the Reading International Solidarity Centre. Back when J M WINOLJ used to live in Reading we used to go there quite a lot with her, and in those days the food was the sort of mostly vegetarian vaguely wholefoody stuff you would expect such a place to have, which was by no means bad, but it now has Ethiopian food which is one of the things that Oxford lacks.
At one of the back tables there were a bunch of Americans talking about music, the first thing I heard was discussion of delay pedals. They had obviously toured, maybe I would have recognised them if I were the sort of person who recognised musicians.
The third set of people to arrive apart from us and the musician was a couple of guys in, I guess, their 30s. The initial vibe I got was post-relationship break-up meet-up in bar. However, although I wasn't listening particularly since

t__m__i and I were making polite and witty conversation (*) it turned out it was some sort of post-band break-up meeting. The impression emerged that the main bitterness was between one of the guys and a 3rd member of the band not there, and that this has happened 2 1/2 years ago or thereabouts. 'I should have phoned you up as well as him that night'. 'Yes, you should have'.
Then came the priceless line and I had to concentrate very hard on not bursting out laughing. 'We should have done that second gig'.

Ah, bless.

(*) actually reading copies of iWord and This Week magazines